A data centre is a late 20th Century development that has grown as a response to the increasing demand for computer processing capability and a recognition of the importance of IT in the place of every business and organisation today. Whereas smaller organisations have sufficient processing power with laptops, PCs and occasionally servers, larger organisations require higher capacity centralised processing to serve a wide range of needs and applications. A few years ago this capacity was supplied by large mainframe computers, but more recently the method used has been to provide data centres comprising many networked computer servers known as blades installed in racks enabling controlled and modular expansion of capacity. The racks also typically house telecommunications equipment such as routers to handle data flow between the computer servers and data flow between the data centre and the outside world.
Data centres can mirror the growth and business activities of successful companies. The growth of a data centre within an expanding company may typically work as follows:
1. Initially the data centre may start as single rack of servers in an air conditioned room—sometimes referred to as a ‘data closet’.
2. As the organisation expands and along with it the number of IT racks employed, the closets become ‘Server Rooms’ or ‘IT Rooms’.
3. Eventually the number of racks and size of room expands, often to the point where a dedicated building or part of a building houses the IT. Whilst there is no strict definition of when the size of an IT facility becomes large, or sophisticated, enough to be termed a “data centre”, data centres are typically relatively large IT facilities providing robust and resilient IT facilities. Typically, there will be more than 50 servers (often many more) and at least some redundancy in the power supply powering the servers to ensure continuity of service.
4. As the company grows and/or becomes a multi-national organisation additional data centres will be built and sometimes numbers of these will be consolidated into ‘Super Data Centres’.
Data centre facilities can require a floor space ranging from a few hundred square feet to a million square feet. The most prevalent size for a small data centre is five to ten thousand square feet with fifty to a hundred thousand square feet being the most common floor area requirement for a large data centre.
Data centres will typically have the ability to deliver applications spread across an organisation and/or supply chain and/or customers in differing geographical locations. There will typically be a dedicated mechanical and electrical (M&E) plant to deliver power, cooling and fire suppression with built-in redundancy with the aim of providing near continuous operation.
The IT industry has long recognised the criticality of central computing facilities and the need for energy efficient operations to control cost effectiveness. Current data centre technology is the summation of 30 years of innovation and engineering design thought and has come a long way in recent times. The most advanced new data centre designs tend to fall into one of two different types, each of which has advantages and disadvantages. The first, more traditional, type of data centre is a huge, custom built warehouse style building which is often located so as to be able to take advantage of local weather conditions to aid cooling of the IT equipment it houses. These data centres can be spacious, ergonomic and highly energy efficient because the structure, layout and cooling systems of each data centre are designed from scratch around its particular location and intended use. Yahoo!'s “Computing Coop” data centre in New York is an example of this type of data centre.
The drawbacks of this type of data centre are the large cost and length of time for construction, which are necessary consequences of the bespoke design model. It is also not easy to add capacity—the data centre must be built large enough in the first place to cope with future increases in the number of servers required by its owner/occupier. These factors also make this style of data centre impractical for companies who need only a small or medium-sized data centre. A further significant drawback is the fact that only a few sites worldwide have a climate suitable for hosting such a large installation without placing undue demands on the cooling systems. The need for a large skilled construction workforce to be available at the site further limits the number of suitable locations.
The second type of data centre is the modular data centre, which is constructed from several factory-built modules. The modules are typically built and sometimes even fitted out at a central facility and then shipped to the location of the data centre, where they are connected together and to the local utilities. U.S. Pat. No. 7,738,251 (Google), for example, describes a modular data centre in which each module is formed by an ISO shipping container. This second type of data centre addresses some of the problems with the first type, but has several disadvantages of its own. In particular, it is necessary for easy transport of the modules that they conform to the dimensions of ISO shipping containers; however this significantly limits the space available inside each module for IT equipment, cooling systems and human access. If actual shipping containers are used as the basic modules, then this also places severe constraints on how the modules can be linked up into a single data centre. These features also mean that this style of data centre is generally not as energy efficient as the first type.
Some of the disadvantages of containerised data centres are overcome by the modular data centres described in WO 2010/139921 (Bripco) and WO 2011/051655 (Colt Technology Services). The data centres of WO 2010/139921 and WO 2011/051655 both consist of several modules which connect to form a building having internal spaces that span several modules. This allows for many more layout options than is possible with a containerised design.
The data centres of WO 2010/139921 and WO 2011/051655 still suffer from the disadvantage that, because the modules are assembled away from the site of the data centre, each module must be transported as a volumetric unit (where the volume of the unit when operational is the same as the volume of the unit when being transported). This necessarily involves significant costs due to the size of the modules, much of which volume comprises empty space inside the modules. This feature of prior art modular and/or containerised data centres places a limit on how energy efficient and cost-effective they can be, when the entire supply and construction process is taken into account.
The present invention seeks to mitigate the above-mentioned problems. Alternatively or additionally, the present invention seeks to provide an improved data centre and an improved method of constructing a data centre.